Researching a fictional setting

In the novel I’m working on now, my characters live upon the fictional ring fort of Laochre. It’s actually based upon Hook Head, a peninsula in Ireland near Waterford. I have an island setting, as well as the mainland. I bought, for lack of a better term, a coffee table book on Hook Head titled The Hook Peninsula. I’d highly recommend buying these types of books to anyone researching a setting. The color photographs make it so much easier to create the setting I want. By combining the different photographs, I can create something that would have been realistic for the time period, even though these places never existed.

Part of this book involves renovations. I affectionately nicknamed Patrick MacEgan’s story the “Home Depot” book. There is a great deal of rebuilding the damaged ring fort, and part of that is used to bring both the Irish and Norman forces together. It’s said that the Norman invaders became “more Irish than the Irish themselves,” and I think it’ll be fun to explore that.

This is an aerial shot of the Hill of Tara, which my fictional fortress of Laochre is modelled after. Hey, if I want my hero to be a petty king, he has to have a good bit of land. One of the interesting facts I learned was that Ireland had hundreds of petty kings. Any man who commanded more than 25-30 people would have been among the kings. There were three levels of kings: petty kings, provincial kings, and the High King. Seems like Ireland was overflowing with royalty! But the customs are fascinating, and I’ve enjoyed learning about the way kings were made. They were elected during the 12th century, and any man could be a king if he had the leadership.

There were some not-so-savory methods of claiming the kingship (one story speaks of a king who was asked to bathe in the blood of a white mare). Another bit of trivia: Instead of bowing before a king, the men would raise a knee as a gesture of respect.